Column A new series explores how development and industry effect trees.

Designers Raw Color and Studio Maarten Kolk Guus Kusters (MKGK) have created a new series called Temporary Trees. As written by Kahlil Gibran:

Trees are poems that earth writes upon the sky,
We fell them down and turn them into paper,
That we may record our emptiness.

For the last eleven years I have been living among oak, eucalyptus and bay, trees that reach heights of up to 150 feet. When you live with trees like that, it is possible to respect and admire their strength, beauty and complexity. A few years ago, Sudden Oak Death swept through our swath of Northern California. We lost a couple of very big trees. It was a humbling experience.

“Temporary trees‚ Poplar & Oak”

When I saw the Temporary Trees project, it struck a chord of fragility and pathos with its intent:

The project is a social commentary on how plant-life, once cherished, is now forgotten in favor of development and industry. Trees are often regarded as objects and are removed according to the landscape plan ruthlessly. In the Netherlands trees typically reach only one tenth of the age that they could make.

For Raw Color and Studio Maarten Kolk & Guus Kusters trees are anything but static. They are ever changing life forms that determine how we experience light, shade, wind and changes of the seasons. This observation is translated to illusions‚ of trees in different materials, that represent the life, dynamics and transformation of trees.

“Temporary trees‚ Weeping Willow & Plantan”

The project, part of Make a Forest, an international platform, will be presented at Object Rotterdam 2012.

“Temporary trees‚ Pollard Willow”

May Temporary Trees and the Make a Forest project continue to inspire tribute to the diversity of our forests, encouraging us to embrace what we’ve got, before it’s gone.

Check out the video of the making of Temporary Trees.

Leaves – Temporary Trees from Raw Color on Vimeo.

Inspired by a post on designboom

Eco, trends, art, creativity and how they tumble through social media to shape culture fascinate EcoSalon columnist Dominique Pacheco. Her trends blog, mixingreality, speaks to these topics daily, and here at EcoSalon, she takes a weekly look at the intersection of eco and art. We call it heARTbeat.

With ads like these, you could almost skip the museum.

From cradle to grave, we are being marketed to. At this point in life, we’re more inclined to tolerate the relentless bombardment from Saatchi & Saatchi as long as our personal aesthetics are given the respect they deserve. Make us feel clever and we might even consider buying that thing we don’t really need; at the very least, a clever ad will get talked (and blogged) about.

The point being, we consumers love a good arty ad. But even Mad Men‘s Draper would agree that the modern day advertiser might be piggybacking on the shoulders of The Masters a bit too contentedly. It’s fatiguing, like shouldering an otherwise adorable nephew for five minutes too many on a trip to the zoo. I’m even beginning to wonder if repurposing and sampling great art for mediocre ads is passing into Madison Avenue cliché.

Take, for example, Salvador Dali: the George Clinton of the advertising industry. Few artists are sampled as much as he is, save maybe Van Gogh and Andy Warhol.

Here is his masterpiece The Persistence of Memory:

And here he is pitching Lexus and VW.

Leonardo da Vinci has had his Sly & The Family Stone moments, too, sampled by campaigns as diverse as an online gambling website to rat poison.

Here’s Mona selling pizza and casual sex.

The entire genre of Chinese landscape painting was the inspiration behind this Skoda ad.

Meanwhile, red-soled, stiletto pusher Christian Louboutin recently relied on French Neoclassicism to sell his wares.

Here, Marie-Guillemine Benoist’s Portrait d-une Negresse with the Balda Booty.

And Georges de la Tour’s Magdalene and the Flame lusting after the Puck Boot. Can you blame her?

René Magritte is another, here sampled by VW (again) and veggie-chopper’s Magimix.

Nevertheless, designer Igor “Rogix” Udushlivy has elevated the not-so-fine art of re-purposing famous artworks to genius with his Magritte-inspired coat hangers.

Here’s to something truly surprising, innovative and wall-worthy that makes parting with cash truly worthwhile.

Images: The Telegraph; Cuded; The Dandelion Chronicles; Design Milk

Beautiful detritus or a grim reminder of what has become of one of America’s most important cities?

Detroit was once the fourth largest city in the United States. It is now the 18^th most populous due to a massive population bleed that started in the 1960s and became a hemorrhage in the past decade. Census figures show that from 2000 to 2010, Detroit lost a quarter of its population. Once upon a time, 44 percent of the Metro area’s population resided within city limits. Today, that figure hovers at just 18 percent.

It has been enjoying a hipster renaissance of late, and is a darling for the urban farming movement. Nevertheless, the fact remains: Motor City is in a state of post-decline, primed to be built again or razed and reinvented entirely.

In the meantime, the remains of more than 70,000 abandoned buildings stand undead in the city: They are standing, if by a skeletal frame, but void of familial and community life. They stand rather like apparitions; ghastly specters of a Great American Dreamscape turned burial ground. For that, they are striking. But are they beautiful?

I touched base with Kevin Bauman, creator of the photographic essay 100 Abandoned Houses, to discern just that.

Photojournalists and artists have been making pilgrimages to Detroit to capture its haunting detritus for years, notably New York photographer Andrew Moore and Parisians Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre.

Bauman, however, is a local.

Having grown up in the Detroit Metro area, Bauman started photographing the abandoned houses in the mid-90s as both a creative exercise and a way of understanding what was happening to his native city.

“How could a city in the United States of America be in such a bad state?” he asked himself, thinking, “This is absurd or some sort of sad joke.”

He initially focused on the Brush Park area on the outskirts of Detroit’s entertainment district. The area has since been redeveloped with the construction of new sporting arenas, lofts and condos. Bauman turned his camera on the remaining 135 square miles of Detroit that was left untouched and ignored by developers. He switched from photographing in black and white to color and adopted a more documentary style.

Eventually, people started asking for prints and now his work hangs in galleries (currently on exhibit at the Victor Lope Arte Contemporaneo in Barcelona).

“At first, I didn’t feel right selling pictures of the houses because that was what people had to live with,” he says. “If you have to look at these abandoned houses every day and live across the street from them, you don’t see any beauty in them.”

The eeriness of being in an urban area and hearing nothing save for the howl of a roaming dog (warning: graphic video) unnerved Bauman, as well. During his photographic expeditions he’s encountered 20 foot high piles of toilets, houses with their facades ripped off completely, entire floors stuffed with garbage, and – the lifeblood of any city – concerned citizens.

“In respect to the people that live there and want to live there, I hope my project makes people want to learn more about Detroit.”

Mayor David Bing has announced plans to bulldoze large swathes of the city; meanwhile, the abandoned structures serve as eyesores to neighbors, nefarious playgrounds for criminals, and art canvases for others.

You can buy prints from Bauman’s Abandoned Houses series through his website. He donates a third of his proceeds to Habitat for Humanity Detroit and The Greening of Detroit.

Images: Kevin Bauman; Yves Marchand & Romain Meffre

Maria Moyer goes from being a brand strategist to artist while still following a sustainable map.

What happens when you pick a road and stick to it? You get good at one thing and are ready for another. So goes the life highway of Wink Communication founder Maria Moyer. We’ve been big fans of Moyer for some time having discovered her work through an inspiring New York Times article on the Bureau of Friends back in 2009.

Successfully weaving sustainability and social issues into her work as a brand strategist at Wink, Moyer is now ready to examine the life aquatic with an art exhibit titled Blue, dedicated to the complexities of ocean based on her bi-coastal life in California and New York. The collection will be open to the public September 8th, at ROGAN in New York City and her pieces can be seen indefinitely  at BDDW.

“The collection is really a moment of reflection for me,” says Moyer, who has always lived by the ocean, having grown up in Southern California.

She says on her site that her childhood permitted frequent access to ocean landscapes and creatures, citing even at age 11, “while other kids played with dolls and Lego sets,” Moyer had an opportunity—under the watchful eye of a professor—to dissect a beached 18-foot squid. Years later, while her friends bought Eurail passes for trips abroad, she ventured farther into the Pacific, backpacking through remote areas of the Hawaiian Islands.

Susan Casey, O Magazine Editor-in-Chief and bestselling author of The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks, and Giants of the Ocean and The Devil’s Teeth: A True Story of Obsession and Survival Among America’s Great White Sharks, says Moyer’s work is a “gorgeous blend of sensitivity and sensibility; she never fails to spot the beauty of the natural world—even if it’s hidden 20,000 leagues beneath the sea. But it’s one thing to identify the sublime essence of, say, zooplankton or roses, and another thing to translate it into exquisite forms. For Maria, the former invariably leads to the latter.  There is no better word I can think of to describe her unique mix of whimsy, sophistication, and science than: delightful.”

While you can currently see some of Moyer’s art at BDDW in New York City, on September 7th, Bowery based fashion label ROGAN will host an invite only “cultural cross-roads of surf, fashion, arts and music in NYC creating a movement inspired by city and ocean.” ROGAN has invited friends to collaborate and create one-of-a-kind pieces and limited edition capsule collections for ROGAN VS. LOOMSTATE-SRF CTY, to be sold exclusively at the ROGAN store. The Blue collection will open to the public on September 8th, with 10% of all sales benefiting Waves for Water.

Julie Gilhart (with Anna Wintour) wearing Moyer’s Circle and Swirl necklace.

We were lucky to catch up with Moyer this week to ask a few questions about her collection and the inspiration behind it.

Here’s what she had to say.

One part of your life deals with helping others to set communication strategy and to develop clear messages (Wink Communication), the other asks you to create and tell the world who YOU are and what’s important to you through your art. Is this a challenge for you, or do they compliment each other?

I’m so glad you asked this question. It’s a good one. The answer: Both. Trying to do both is both a challenge AND these roles compliment each other. I want to be good at both. Making porcelain objects or creating things from wood is a great joy. It’s also intellectually and physically challenging. At the same time, it is somewhat solitary and a little self-absorbing as I persist in getting an idea across, or in my attempt to get a specific result from the material. On the other hand, my consulting practice is highly collaborative and in service to a person or an organization, many of whom are in pursuit of a greater good themselves. My work with Yves Behar, for example. Both compliment each other as they are the social and solitary parts of me. The challenge is time management. Isn’t it always?

“Untitled,” Unglazed stoneware frames (this piece contains 12 frames), sand, feathers, a eucalyptus leaf, a skate egg case, seaweed, and surf wax remnants.

Your Southern California childhood had a direct effect on your appreciation for ocean. Of all aspects of life lived by the ocean, why go for promoting “the tiny plants and animals at the foundation of the Earth’s food chain?”

Have you seen photos of plankton under a microscope? They are gorgeous. I will have a life-time of inspiration from them alone. Many of them come with a silica-based armor (not unlike porcelain) that protects them from predators – a most complex and miraculous architecture. If their beauty doesn’t get your attention, the facts might: Phytoplankton, including algae, sink more carbon than our Earth’s forests and they are also, as you said, a huge part of the world’s food chain. Beauty and power.
To know them is to LOVE them.

Temporary Bliss Bird Vessel (and necklace). Stoneware, unglazed porcelain and (azo, chromium and lead-free) leather cord. Available at BDDW in NYC.

What’s your favorite piece and why?

More than the resulting object itself, the process of making them is what makes something a favorite. It’s tough to choose between them. I’m very excited about a recent group that I call ‘vacuoles.’ They are in the “Blue” collection that I just (today) finished installing at Rogan in NYC. I also love and might not be able to part with an untitled wall installation at Rogan; it’s a bi-coastal archive of beach ephemera; a personal, natural-history journal. A lot of wonderful people in my life were involved in making this work. I had to get friends from all over to contribute sand from ‘my’ beaches. And I love a piece at BDDW that is a bird vessel.

Temporary Bliss Bird Vessel. Stoneware, unglazed porcelain and (azo, chromium and lead-free) leather cord. Available at BDDW in NYC.

Here’s a preview of more art from Blue at ROGAN as well as what you can find at BDDW.

Diatom. Unglazed porcelain. Approximately 6″ diameter.

Porcelain Breast Plate, (azo, chromium and lead free) leather cord.

Box of Hours. Stoneware and porcelain.

Blue Tab Necklace for ROGAN. Porcelain dipped in blue wash, (azo, chromium and lead free) leather cord. Various size and shapes.

Top image by Leslie Williamson

ExclusiveArtist Alicia Escott’s intensely humane explorations of loss, longing, commercialism and ultimately, love.

“The best way I can express this is that I have lost enough hope to find a new hope.”

San Francisco-based artist Alicia Escott tells me this over coffee at The Summit, a popular cafe in the Mission District. We’re talking frankly, not philosophically, about pragmatic challenges of creativity and environmental issues, specifically, how one can retain any sort of optimism, much less focus, in the face of the enormous ecological challenges we face. (There have been six great “die offs”; we are poised for another.) “I heard an environmentalist being interviewed once,” she is saying. “The journalist asked him how he was okay with eating meat or some other destructive behavior. He answered, something like, ‘You know, you wake up in the morning, you take a shower then you walk around the corner to get coffee. It’s 9 a.m. and you have already walked over a mountain of skulls.’”

Escott is thoughtful, though not measured. She pauses for fresh lengths between questions.

“I function with a dichotomy that is extreme in a sense – I both think it’s perhaps ‘too late’ for humans but I also think about things from an evolutionary point of view,” she says. “Humans came out of great tumult. We are on the verge of another tumult. So I feel daily heartbreak; yet I also feel hope.”

Escott has already made a name for herself in environmental circles for her subtly captivating pieces that use disposable packaging as a medium for transcribing objects of both life and destruction. There is a bear on a bag seemingly expiring in undergrowth, a trout as litter in a stream (literally a fish out of water), and an atom bomb test on a to-go sushi container. (The last was too popular in a sense, says Escott. “They are so optically beautiful they trick you. That was a distraction from what I’m really wanting to talk about, so I did not make more.”)

The work, most notably that created on plastic sacks and film, is so fragile as to be temporary; the fleeting hand-drawn images are something like a compassionate catalog of the living past, or what will soon be our past. The art will not survive, and in fact, is not meant to – Escott has entire series expressly created to be recycled. But to describe her as an environmental artist or to view her work as somehow ironic is to miss the point.

“My approach is one of a thoughtful person, not only as an environmentalist, activist, or green advocate,” Escott says. “I am very hesitant about labels. I think we are making mistakes, and I have a lot of pain around these issues…but it’s really not for me to say. Us poisoning our oceans may return us, simply, to a primordial soup. Perhaps something better can come out of it. So my approach is holistic.”

There are eternal, contextually unsettling and shamanistic themes in Escott’s work. In a recently commenced series, she sends “Love Letters,” dated from the past, to acquaintances and friends alike. The letters include faded sepia and black and white photographs of simple scenes like children in yards and flocks of birds. The letters are poetic, eerie, profoundly haunting – and just slightly creepy. “It’s interesting playing with that tension,” she says with a mischievous smile. It’s clearly also enjoyable. My own Love Letter (“Love Letter to a Thick Billed Ground Dove. Extinct 1927.”) begins with “Last week I set the clock on my iPhone to December 18th, 1914″ and includes the following line:

“Then came rock n roll. More than anything I wish I could show you rock n roll, you would love it, I’m sure. And there was the telephone, and then answering machines and call waiting and then caller id, and now you can have that with you always. Honestly.

There would never need to be these distances anymore.”

My notebook contains this list of words I jotted down before meeting with Escott, and I share them with her.

Bereft

Buddhist

Longing

Acceptance

Human

Lonely

Heartbreak

Healing

I ask if the Buddhist tendency is intentional. I’m the first writer to do so, and she considers it for a long moment. “My work tracks the heart – attachment, loss.” There is an unmistakable healing quality to the approach. “I work from the perspective of the human condition and more so the condition of life,” she says.

Alicia Escott

“I used to talk more about the evils of plastic and was focused on didactic aims,” Escott says. “Now, I am talking about something more esoteric, I view plastic as [among other things] a metaphor for talking about the packaging of our lives. Ideas are virtualized. They are commoditized – they are Likes on Facebook.”

The works’ comment on contemporary culture’s materialism and collective isolation is a compassionate treatment. She says she deals with complex issues simply, but her creations are pure more than anything else. Hence the trouble with labels.

“Consciousness must occur on many layers; it’s not just green. It’s easy to get bogged down by categories – but we shouldn’t stay too long.”

Images courtesy Alicia Escott. Works featured are from the series Littered Drawings.

SeriesExquisite silks frozen in time.

As part of her series, CastAways, artist Nicole Dextras placed these orange silk fabrics out in the ice cold landscape. Once frozen, they resemble natural life forms, reminiscent of women wearing long, flowing gowns. The beauty of this ephemeral art form lies in its brevity and the mystery it leaves behind once it melts and disappears.

Editor’s note: This is the latest installment of a new art series at EcoSalon, The Heart of Art.

Conscious themes in mainstream performance art.

Two recent London plays have had audiences grappling with environmental issues. The National Theater’s production of Greenland, slammed as partisan, dull and rotten theater by the critics, dealt with sea levels rising in the Maldives and the failed UN talks in Copenhagen. Another show, The Heretic, a black comedy by stand-up Richard Bean, drew raves over its comedic approach to atmospheric doom and gloom, focusing on an earth scientist at York University. When her studies on rising sea levels fail to yield a major grant, she appears on BBS’s Newsnight and is fired, only to end up with a column in the Daily Telegraph. Both shows feature what else? A polar bear as symbol of our shame. As one Guardian critic put it, “Climate change drama is the new growth industry.”

As green creeps into art and seeps subliminally into our global consciousness, we wonder if it makes a dent in our behavior, the true test of a shift. While New York Times reviewer, Matt Wolf, dismissed Greenland as a “falsely stitched patchwork quilt” of worse case scenarios alongside a few facts, he also admitted muttering “Recycle, recycle, recycle,” all the way home. Easily distracted as we tend to be in bad theater, his review says he also became painfully aware of the mundane activities of audience members as they crumpled packets of snacks and popped plastic water bottles. “Hang on!” I wanted to call out,” he shares. “Is no one paying this show any heed?”

It is a good question, one posed in 1971 when The Lorax was first published, Dr. Seuss’s post-Sixties warning not to fool with Mother Nature and her magical Truffula Trees, Swomee-Swans, brown Bar-Ba-Loots and Humming-Fishes. The yellow Lorax, who spoke on behalf of the trees, convinces the Once-ler to resist chopping them down to mass produce Thneeds. The lesson of greed leading to environmental destruction is being reintroduced to a new audience four decades later as an animated 3-D feature to be released March of 2012.

Arguably catering to the adult brain, the same way the irony in Shrek went past young viewers, the Lorax’s undeniable message comes at a better time now than its dawn in the 70′s, when many people still thought it was okay to throw potato chip bags out the window, run sprinklers with no end in sight, and were watching blockbuster movies like The Graduate, where a young Dustin Hoffman looked at “plastics” as his future. Nowadays, film and theater goers are much more sensitized to these underlying messages, young and old alike, thanks to the groundwork of environmentalists who act as stewards of the planet and creative writers relying on entertainment as their hybrid vehicle of transformation.

Fine art also relies on subtle interpretations of symbolism in producing change, and like many theaters, the conscious mission means process as well as product. At Eco-Logical in Los Angeles, the emphasis is on exhibiting the work of a community which uses repurposed and recycled materials.

The gallery provides salvaged billboard vinyl as canvases to artists in exchange for exposure, sparing an estimated 450 million square feet of toxic, non-biodegradable billboard vinyl tossed into landfills each year. The fine art, billboard art viewed by thousands weekly, and functional art naturally deals with eco themes, such as works premiered in its highly successful EartH exhibit, visited by more than 400 art goers.

The notion of urban blight reborn as art and theater crafted to spare trees and polar bears offers hope at a time when green as a popular movement has neared the saturation point, risking the chance of making us immune to the message.  In this way, playwright Bean’s brand of humor in The Heretic and Seuss’s quirky metaphorical verse in The Lorax might be the tonic for the catatonic, and even those resisting the green bandwagon’s cultural hold will be muttering “recycle, recycle, recycle,” all the way home.

Images: More Intelligent Life; The Royal Court Theater; Papahere; Eco-Logical

SeriesA mound of dead batteries is reborn as a colorful sea creature.

A battery powers everything from appliances to watches to your car, and when it’s out of juice, well, that’s the end of it. Nowhere else to go but the landfill.

Artist Michel de Broin had another idea. He gathered hundreds of old batteries before they landed at the recycle facility and made his Dead Star, a colorful creation that seems to come alive, again.

Editor’s note: This is the latest installment of a new art series at EcoSalon, The Heart of Art.

QuoteDaily quotes at EcoSalon.

“Love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is done well.”  – Vincent van Gogh

Image: qthomasbower

Land artist Jim Denevan’s medium is sand.

From a single piece of driftwood, a low tide, endless grains of sand, and inspiration, art is born. Then, just a handful of hours later, the tide rises and the work blurs, finally melting away. Artist Jim Denevan repeats this transient artistry on beaches around the world.

The ephemeral beauty of Denevan has graced frozen lakes, dry lakes, and desert sands in addition to the sand that parallels our oceans.

Denevan’s fleeting artistic endeavors are the largest pieces of artwork ever created (some are several miles in diameter). The wonder of his artwork falls into the category of land art.

The brilliance of Denevan was wound into eloquence by the Anthropologist:

“Artist Jim Denevan is in pursuit of the impermanent. From the vanishing curl of a wave to sand briefly stilled between tides, nature’s fleeting moments are his stock-in-trade.”

Denevan also creates art with earth and ice. Outside the realm of art, Denevan founded Outstanding in the Field – a mobile feast aimed to, “re-connect diners to the land and the origins of their food, and to honor the local farmers and food artisans who cultivate it.”

For more inspiring land art, explore Andy Goldsworthy’s land art.